Do you Heathen think Chief Heathen Curtains Officer will approve these?

During the Second World War, Charles and Ray Eames made leg splints for injured soldiers.

Steak Toaster.

Companies Baffled by iPhone’s Success:

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin… is to manipulate users by identifying their “need states” — including such compulsions as ‘killing time,’ and ‘making the most of it’ — and fulfilling them subliminally.”

How about this: make a product that doesn’t suck, and that aggressively creates a better user experience than what was previously available. Profit. I particularly like that they’re confused why all the good mojo is accruing to Apple and not AT&T. Could it be that it’s because nobody is confused about who actually made the iPhone?

Compubeaver, that is.

Here’s a fairly comprehensive discussion of the physics of Pinewood Derby cars. Turns out our parents were full of it in re: shape and what other factors were likely to produce a win, but they were both more biology types than engineering. What can you do?

David Pogue lays out why so many consumer electronic devices sucks ass.

Batphone?

BoingBoing Gadgets covers their picks; we just want to say that the first one they list was one of our favorites back in the day (497 Galactic Explorer FTW!).

Because the iPhone uses the same charging system as my iPod, my capitulation means I have to carry one fewer charger when traveling — and that, in the event of a loss, replacing it will be significantly easier, since it’s easier to find an iPod dealer than a cell phone shop with the ProprietaryCharger du Jour in stock.

In which I discuss and comment upon the new toy.

Really? You paid $400, and you still need to be told this?

The manual includes this: “Do not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, deform, puncture, shred, microwave, incinerate, paint, or insert foreign objects into iPhone.”

Finally

The iPhone totally wins on the “speaker, phone, or earbud?” interface mechanism. With the RAZR, I was never sure what would happen if I took a call with Bluetooth on and my headset in range. With the Treo, it was somewhat more predictable, but still a pain to switch during a call. With the 8525, it was back to nightmare mode. The iPhone’s “in a call” menu has a button clearly marked “Output” the brings up a three-item menu. Choose what you want. End of story. WIN.

Free Stuff!

My first iPod, well before the craze took over, was the original 5 gig model with a physical scroll wheel. It came with the a wall-wart, the Firewire charging cable, a dock, and headphones. In the years since, Apple’s trimmed the kit down to just a sync cable and some earbuds, which kind of sucks if you’d prefer to charge by plugging into the wall. The iPhone, though, comes with the whole kit again, which is nice. It means we also now have enough kit that we keep an iPod charging setup in the living room, for Erin’s Nano, plus one at my desk for the iPhone during the day, plus the one that never leaves my briefcase for use when I travel. No forgotten chargers FTW!

MORE free stuff!

I just discovered a polishing/buffing cloth in the box. Nice.

In which we expose our Aaron Sorkin geekery

The iPhone means we can always carry “Shibboleth” with us, which keeps Mrs Heathen happy. “Once More With Feeling,” too, once we get ahold of something to rip it with.

Native Sync Wins

A decade ago, when the first Pilots emerged and before Outlook took over, Palm quickly established itself as the de facto desktop PIM *because* using it was part of what made the Palm so successful. The effortless sync meant you never thought anything of adding an event or address on one device or the other, because you knew the data would flow without any worries about lost or duplicated entries or whatever. It’s great that we can now sync any phone with any desktop, nearly, but the tight coupling of the iPhone and Apple’s native calendar and address book tools means my sync troubleshooting days are over.

The Triumphant Return of HeathenPix

As with the halcyon bygone days of the Treo, the iPhone makes it simple to take quickie phone shots and email ’em to Flickr. Enjoy.

So I didn’t buy an iPhone last summer. Instead, I worked up a head of steam over “no 3rd party dev” and “walled garden” and “no 3G” and “no physical keyboard” and got something else that met my steam-headed criteria, and which I immediately found wanting. I’m sure the good folks at HTC aren’t completely to blame here, since the hardware is pretty much fine, but holy shit is Windows Mobile ever made of FAIL. As an example, here’s how you close a program in WinMo:

1. Click the upper left start button
2. Choose Settings
3. Choose System
4. Choose Memory
5. Choose Running Programs
6. Select the program you wish to quit
7. Press “end program”.

No word of it a lie. Seriously. How in the big blue FUCK did Windows Mobile get to version 5 with this kind of shit in it? Is there NO QA or usability testing up there?

Also, the whole 3G thing? Wholly overblown, and — crucially — way ahead of the battery curve. Usable life on the WinMo phone was less than a full business day, and woe unto you if you hit a web page and then forget to kill the browser, as you may well look down at the phone at 2:30 in the afternoon and discover it begging for juice because the browser is too stupid to stop refreshing web pages when the display is off.

Sure, the phone did have some features an iPhone lacks, but ended up being so frustrating to use, and so unreliable, that I never did any of those things. In fact, some modern phone features — sending snapshots to Flickr, sending quickie SMS — were so much harder to do on it compared to my last two phones (a RAZR and a Treo 650) that I actually stopped doing them, more or less. Again: EPIC FAIL.

Today, about 8 months into my contract (with ATT, fortunately), I gave up and bought an iPhone. You know what? It just fucking works. It synced with my Mac out of the box (admittedly, only of interest to other Mac people, but being able to kick these losers to the curb is a fringe benefit), but I suspect the out of the box experience on Windows isn’t that much different. It synced down my mail config, so I didn’t have to key in IMAP servers and ports and whatnot, even.

Oh, apparently, it also plays music and videos, but frankly I couldn’t care less about that. I’ve got an 80 gig iPod; another 8 isn’t even interesting. And the iPhone is good enough at being a PDA that having the music and movie options is just gravy.

That being the case, someone please get us this $300, 4100 lumen flashlight that is capable of setting things on fire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Fucking Fucker, made completely of NOS tubes.

Don’t you think we could use this handy survival kit from the good folks at Smith & Wesson?

Forty-foot tall fire-breathing Robosaurus for sale.

Because I never got one of these as a child. However, First Niece may need one. DigDig indeed.

This dude’s got a really really big shotgun.

The entire run of Rolling Stone is now available on DVD. It might be worth it for the HST archives alone.

Costumes for our Roomba.

Dear Intarwub: We need this for the garden.

Kthxbi.

Mrs Heathen is going to have to work very hard to convince us that this is a bad idea.

A while back we noticed the 43Folders story about a brief flirtation with the previous “hot” e-book device, Sony’s Reader. More open than previous options, the Reader could accept PDFs and other files for reading, but the compromises this forced turned the whole experience into a joke, and the reviewer returned the device as a result.

Frankly, the problem being solved here eludes us, given how portable, cheap, scalable, and fault-tolerant actual books are. Most people don’t want or need to carry more than a book or two (professionals with large and dynamic reference libraries are, of course, a different case). Still, companies continue to invest in the idea. Amazon is the next big player with their brand-new Kindle, which apparently sold out almost immediately. Frankly, it’s no more attractive to us than the Sony despite its admittedly groundbreaking qualities. It is not, for example, tethered to a computer at all; instead, it’s got a wireless modem that connects directly to Amazon and the Internet. However, it fails on some of the same points as the Sony, plus adds some nickle-and-diming bullshit that’s frankly below Amazon — for example, the Kindle wants the user to pay a subscription fee to read web sites on the it that are free on the public Internet, for example, and while it’ll take Word files and other personal documents via email, Amazon will charge you a dime for every one you send over. And of course, the Amazon’s ebooks are loaded with DRM, which means that it ultimately works for Amazon, not you, despite its $400 price tag. As Gruber points out:

Kindle actually is what ignorant critics have claimed regarding the iPod: a device designed to lock you in to a single provider of both hardware and digital content. You can easily and happily use an iPod without ever buying anything from the iTunes Store; without Amazon’s DRM-protected content, a Kindle is the world’s worst handheld computer.

What happens if Amazon decides this market doesn’t work, and bails? Ask people with “PlaysForSure” music bought from Microsoft. (Hint: you get screwed.) Gruber continues:

the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Gadgets are cool. We like gadgets. We admit that if someone could create a real “book iPod,” we’d be interested — but that’s not likely to happen for several reasons, most notably the inability to get previously purchased content onto the Kindle. It’s simple to rip old CDs to MP3 and put ’em on your iPod; try that with a book and the Kindle. Amazon could have come closest to this idea by adopting the idea mentioned quite a bit in reviews: allow Kindle customers to download free e-books for anything they buy from Amazon as well as for any book they’ve ever bought from Amazon. That is, of course, untenable because of the paranoia of Big Content, so instead we get another DRM nightmare.

At the end of the day, as potentially promising as the idea of a portable high-capacity wireless device with a built-in bookstore is, the Kindle is ultimately a disappointment — but an avoidable one. Amazon already sells music without DRM; why not books? Without open content, we’d have a drastically different opinion. Either the things you buy work for you, or they work for someone else. Our iPod works or us. Kindle works for Amazon. We hope it fails as-is, regardless of how much the biz press may think otherwise. We’ll close with this bit from BoingBoing:

Here’s the biggest mystery of the Internetiverse for me today: why is it that Amazon, the most customer-focused, user-friendly company in the world of physical goods, always makes a complete balls-up hash out of digital delivery of goods? You’d think that they’d be the smartest people around when it comes to using the Internet to sell you stuff you want, but as soon as that stuff is digital, they go from customer-driven angels to grabby, EULA-toting horrors. Why does the Web make Amazon go crazy?

We wonder, too.

We’re pretty sure this is the first time someone has a legitimate claim to the phrase “Murphy bed of the future.”

(Via.)

Please get us a robot goat. Kthxbi.

Back in ’99 or ’00, we finally went in for contact lenses. Once we did, we couldn’t believe we’d waited so long. Our vision was better in every way, and we had virtually no trouble adapting to wearing them. Plus, for the first time EVER, we could buy any sunglasses we wanted, from dime store/ZZ Top specials to fancy Ray-Bans and the like. Frankly, after 20 years of prescription sunglasses, pretty much ALL sunglasses are cheap.

Predictably, we went a bit nuts, and bought a few pairs in the first few months of no-glasses. We stopped, though, when we found Maui Jims, specifically their featherlight, titantium-framed, hinge-less model. There simply is no better pair of sunglasses, we’re convinced, for any amount of money. Sadly, these are pricey — $250 to $300 a pair — but, like good pens, we figured on keeping them for a long while, so we sucked it up and bought ’em in 2001.

Then, in 2003, something awful happened: a crack developed in the titanium wire frame. We packed them up and sent them back to MJ, who have a very generous repair policy. Despite being out of warranty, though, MJ decided they’d just send us another pair, gratis. Score.

We wore those nearly daily until last week, when a similar (but more complete) break happened. All of a sudden, we were holding two halves instead of one whole. Just now, we’ve gotten off the phone with MJ — who, despite being in Illinois, insist on using “aloha” and “Mahalo” in every conversation — and have been informed that the maximum repair cost is $49.95. We’re to send ’em to the MJ mother ship, and should expect a reconstituted set within a week or so.

Mahalo indeed.

Wanna take pinhole pix from inside your own mouth? Now you can.

Apple has made it abundantly clear that having unofficial software, or having unlocked the phone you spent $500 on, may well result in subsequent software updates turning your phone into an expensive paperweight, and you’ll be SOL on the warranty.

Let’s be clear: They’re doing this deliberately. It’s not a “it might happen” and it’s not a “whups! we didn’t realize 3rd party devs were using that!” kind of thing; they’re actively going to break your iPhone if you’ve put software on it they don’t like — which, at this point, means anything that it didn’t come with.

Fuck that. The 8525 we’re using may be clumsy and awkward, but at least it’s OURS. Open platforms uber alles.

“We got a robot in the mail today.”

Make her a Barbie Electric Chair.

If we’d waited, we would’ve be able to complain about Apple fucking us with fancy NEW Nanos.

Seriously, though, they’re mighty nice. Even nicer are the new iPod Classics, which now come in 80 and 160 gig. It might be getting close to time to finally upgrade the long-in-the-tooth 15 gig, so we get one that’s not all funky and sideways before they stop making the good ones.

(Oh, and if you paid $500 for an iPhone? Sucker. The 8-gig iPhone is now $399, or $200 less than than the intro price. The 4-gig iPhone is no longer available.)

Please get us a spherical tree house, okay?

Kthxbi.

Got an extra 35 large? You could pick up a flame-shooting hydraulic Mech. We’re pretty sure neither Amex nor Mrs Heathen want this in our lawn.

(Thanks, RB!)

Forbidden Lego is a collection of Lego designs for models that will never see the light of day in official kits from Lego, Inc.

Forbidden Lego written by a pair of Lego master builders, who used to work in designing advanced Lego sets (e.g., Mindstorms). While they obviously got to work on lots of cool things while they were there, there were certain projects that just turned out not to be suitable to be made into kits released by the Lego company. They wrote the book to give some kind of a tantalizing hint at the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes at Lego, and the kinds of neat things that might get released in a world without product liability suits.

Models described include a catapult and an automatic pistol. Must. Have.

People who know us know we’re gadget fiends. We used Newtons, for crying out loud, before Apple fucked ’em up by ignoring what Palm saw so clearly: small and connected and cheap will win, not big and unsyncable and expensive. The final Newts cost a grand, but wouldn’t sync with our desktop, and were nearly as big as the laptop we had at the time, all while Palms were $299, the size of a pack of smokes, and flawlessly syncable.

Anyway, so Palm ruled for a while. The original Treos were pretty fantastic, and showed what might ultimately happen in the whole PDA-phone convergence space. But for some reason, about 4 years ago, they stopped doing anything new or interesting; every product in their lineup now is a weak riff on the original 600, and that sucks. Heathen Central has even migrated off their venerable 650 to a — gasp — Windows Mobile device; it was only about a buck more than the Treo, but includes vastly greater capabilities (and, as noted at the time, outperforms the iPhone as well).

So, Palm, what the fuck? Fortunately, we’re not the only ones to notice this slackass behavior by Hawkins and company: Engadget lays it out for them quite nicely.

(N.B. the first suggestion under “Other Stuff.”)

We’ve just spoken with our Attorney, who had an amusing tale to tell of Apple technology.

The Attorney is one of the only other folks we know to have used and loved the Newton platform; he had two, since he had to replace the first after a tragic Camaro accident. It appears that this now venerable Newt has spent the last several years plugged in on a shelf in his office as the “deep storage” device for some addresses he rarely needed.

Well, said Attorney purchased the a new iPhone recently, and set about doing some long-needed address book consolidation. In a fit of what can only be described as unabashed optimism, he took note of the infrared eyes on both new and old Apple devices, and attempted to beam the last of his Newton-based addresses to the new iPhone.

It worked.

They’re launching a new DVR-esque set of services, but they’re so limited as to be useless: you can only start shows over, for example, and fast-forwarding or otherwise skipping commercials is forbidden.

Good luck with that.

There exist LEGO ice trays.

BoingBoing points us to Vibram FiveFingers, which may be the silliest shoes we’ve ever seen. We want some.

(update: JJ Casuals link)

Porsche’s got a prototype Cayenne hybrid that can cruise at 70 — on the ‘lectricity alone. It needs go-juice to accelerate, uses effectively zero gas at speed. Nice.

We just enjoy that a Text-O-Possom exists.

Here’s a guitar you haven’t seen in 20 years. The Gittler, most famous for an appearance in a Police video, existed only in 60 custom-made examples. One’s actually at MOMA.

Travian.com

Jalopnik has coverage of the upcoming Porsche 911 GT2, which has the distinction of being the first 911 capable of breaking 200 mph on the way out of the dealership. Twin turbos on top of the 3.6 liter boxer engine produce 530 horses and 505 lb-ft of torque. Zero to sixty in just over three and a half seconds. Price? Don’t ask; we’re guessing somewhere in the buck-and-a-half range, since this is the upmarket version of the turbo.

(By the way, the headline is tongue in cheek; fast as this is, it’s got a radiator. That’s an automatic DQ.)

BoingBoing tells us how to build a secret bookcase door. Hawesome.

The folks over at Will It Blend? have gotten ahold of an iPhone.

The NYT on the new Ferrari F340, the $185,000 “entry level” car[1]:

The F1 sequential manual transmission does away with a clutch pedal, instead giving the driver shift paddles on either side of the steering column, just like a Formula One car (although traditionalists can still order a six-speed manual). The steering wheel features Ferrari’s “mannetino,” a small rotary switch with six settings to tailor the car’s electronic aggressiveness, from a snow-and-ice mode (as if!) to race, to the position beyond race that Ferrari’s people politely asked me not to engage, as it disables all traction and stability control and could easily lead to a Code Red Disgraced Journalist Situation.

More:

One habit I got into with the F430 was digging deep into the throttle and then pulling back for an upshift a few thousand r.p.m. short of the redline. This seems to trick the engine computer into dumping loads of fuel into the intake ports in anticipation of a run to 8,500 r.p.m., because when the F1 transmission clicks off the shift, it’s accompanied by a rifle-shot report, a supersonic whip-crack from the exhaust that prompts you to look in the mirror to see if the car behind you is engulfed in a contrail of flame. That never got old, frankly.

Some of my colleagues in the motoring press tell me that on a track, the F430 can be drifted, tail-out, balanced on the razor edge of adhesion.On the street, its handling imparts a sense of invulnerability that finds you wondering why everyone else is dawdling down off-ramps when they’re perfectly negotiable at 80 m.p.h.

Heh.

[1. That’s $185K new. It’s much, much more than that used, since Ferrari never makes enough to satisfy demand. The author notes that Ferrari left nearly half a billion dollars on the table when it elected to stick with a hard limit of 400 cars for its $650K Enzo.]

(Via Rob.)

Over at Freedom to Tinker, Prof. Felton sums up why the iPhone is important even if you don’t get one:

[…]the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

The iPhone could well turn out to be that shock. The carriers will hate it, but the consumers will be the real winners.

We’re pretty much behind this post about not getting an iPhone, and are even moreso in the “glad we got the 8525” camp after reading this very iPhone-friendly writeup from perpetual Apple booster John Gruber. The whole idea of a “smartphone” without cut-and-paste, or the facility to sync notes back to the desktop, strikes us as folly. The list of things our cheaper Windows Mobile device can do that the iPhone can’t grows longer, and as it turns out they’re things we like to do.

In particular, check this out (from Gruber’s article):

Mail: I hope you like top-posting, and quoting the entire message you’re replying to. Me, I despise that style of email, but iPhone Mail doesn’t really work well any other way. One problem is that the iPhone doesn’t support the concept of selected text. That means you can’t just select a specific portion to quote of the message you’re replying to; nor can you select a chunk of the quoted message and delete it while editing. The only way to delete text is one character at a time (although the keyboard does let you press-and-hold to repeat). And to top it off, there’s no way to reply without quoting anything at all.

Yikes.

Or, at least, WANT TO MAKE: Via BoingBoing, we are now obsessed with this steampunk jar of articulated fireflies.